In 2000, Massimiliano Fuksas curated the Venice Architecture Biennale under the title Less Aesthetics, More Ethics. At the time, the slogan encapsulated a widely shared unease about an architectural culture that had been stuck in formal autonomy for too long. Today, that dichotomy sounds surprisingly dated. Not because ethical questions have become less urgent, but because they can no longer be separated from aesthetics. Contemporary architecture is explicitly judged on its approach to existing structures, material flows, CO2 emissions, and its impact on the natural environment. Yet a building cannot escape aesthetic discussion: after all, architecture manifests itself in form, space, materiality, and detail. The question, therefore, is not whether ethics replaces aesthetics, but how ethical choices shift the aesthetic register of architecture. How does the choice for preservation and reuse, for example, affect the concept of beauty? And when does reuse become more than an ecological or technical given; in other words, when does it become architecture?

In the winning competition design by Sergison Bates and Laboratoire for PXL in Hasselt, that question is given a concrete application. The transformation is conceived as a sequence of value-driven decisions: preservation of structure, reuse of elements, reorganization of circulation patterns, and the creation of new spatial connections. Here, circularity emerges not merely as a technical or ecological ambition, but as an architectural method. The project shifts the focus from building as replacement to designing as recognition, selection, connection, and a way of making things legible again. In this way, PXL becomes a case study in which ethics and aesthetics are not separate entities, but mutually determine one another. As the project progresses, the facade in particular raises the following question: how should reuse manifest itself, and when does the legibility of circularity itself become an aesthetic problem?